Orbot: Tor for Android

The Tor Project

About this app

Orbot is a free VPN and proxy app that empowers other apps to use the internet more securely. Orbot uses Tor to encrypt your Internet traffic and then hides it by bouncing through a series of computers around the world. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Orbot is the only app that creates a truly private internet connection. As the New York Times writes, “when a communication arrives from Tor, you can never know where or whom it’s from.”

Tor won the 2012 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award.

★ ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: Orbot is the safest way to use the Internet on Android. Period. Orbot bounces your encrypted traffic several times through computers around the world, instead of connecting you directly like other VPNs and proxies. This process takes a little longer, but the strongest privacy and identity protection available is worth the wait.
★ PRIVACY FOR APPS: Any app can be routed over Tor via the Orbot VPN feature
★ PRIVACY FOR EVERYONE: Orbot prevents someone watching your connection from knowing what apps you are using or websites you visit. All anyone monitoring your network traffic can see is that you're using Tor.

***We Love Feedback***
★ LEARN MORE: Learn more about Orbot and get involved at https://orbot.app
★ ABOUT US: Guardian Project is a group of developers that make secure mobile apps and open-source code for a better tomorrow.
★ OPEN-SOURCE: Orbot is free software. Take a look at our source code, or join the community to make it better: https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot
★ MESSAGE US: Are we missing your favorite feature? Found an annoying bug? We’d love to hear from you! Send us an email: [e-mail]

***Disclaimer***
Guardian Project makes apps that are designed to protect your security and anonymity. The protocols that we use are widely regarded as the state of the art in security technology. While we are constantly upgrading our software to combat the latest threats and eliminate bugs, no technology is 100% foolproof. For maximum security and anonymity users must utilize best practices to keep themselves safe. You can find a good introductory guide to these topics at https://securityinabox.org

Ratings and reviews

The Orbot app is a good app for privacy. I used to have a problem with it randomly not fully connecting correctly. However I found removing the padding that saves on mobile data and battery turning those off in this app and mobile data limit and mobile data limit warning in the phone settings fixed it. I turn on extra padding for security. The settings in this app can be a bit confusing at first and it also takes a bit to connect fully but once it does its fine. overall 8/10

The app won't open, it'll open to a blank screen, then close immediately. I'll have to do this 5-6 times before I can turn it off due to random websites like Netflix or smaller sites like YouTube saying I'm under strange geo-restriction that shouldn't be there, even when switching locations. Some sites somehow know my location after clearing all cache, website data, etc, etc, and showing vpn is connected, with settings showing apps it's to work with are set correctly. It work then it may not

In countries with severe internet censorship, Tor is the best solution, and having an Android Tor VPN client app is extremely useful. however, Orbot is very rarely updated and there are issues that have been around for a long time. for example the "turn tor off" option never works properly and causes the app to crash several times when you try to reconnect after using it. this crashing issue also sometimes happens randomly. fixing this can save us a lot of time.

What’s new

- update to tor 0.4.8.17
- multiple user interface improvements
- latest support for WebTunnel and Snowflake Proxy